Like the Man in the Square
by Tony Stark's Hidden Side
Summary: As Steve and the newly formed Avengers go to Germany to stop Loki, he can't help but dwell on a question that he was never able to answer: without the serum, what would he have become? Would he have changed like Howard Stark? Died like Bucky Barnes? Would he have given up on the little guys, or died fighting for them? And then he saw, there in the square, who he might have become.


Sometimes Steve wondered what he would have grown up to be like without the serum. He looked around at older people and wondered which of them he was. Would he have been the crotchety old next-door neighbor who screamed at the nearby children to stay off his not-so-pristine lawn? He doubted it, but he didn't feel like the kindly old grandfather whose descendants could do no wrong in his eyes, either. If he thought of older men he looked up to, the first person who came to mind was Dr. Abraham Erskine, who had offered him the chance to test the serum in the first place. But Steve wasn't anything like Erskine, never would have devoted his life to science like that, much as he looked up to the man. So, he still wasn't sure.

When the Avengers were called together, he had next to no free time to think about what he would have been like without the serum, because what had happened, had happened, and nothing was going to change that. The serum was in his blood now, he was Captain America, and the world needed him. That was all that mattered.

Still… would he have become like Fury as he matured? The strong leader of a… secretive and occasionally brutal and cold intelligence agency. No, probably not. Maybe kids like him just didn't survive to middle age, that seemed more accurate than any theory he had come up with so far. He was reckless and too weak to actually do anything reckless… he had never had the best chance of growing up unscathed.

Or maybe the people like him lived quietly in the shadows, out of the public eyes because they were too weak to do anything that made a splash. Maybe they limited themselves to working behind the scenes, helping with aid in flood zones being the extent of their heroism. Maybe, too, the secret was simply that they changed as they grew, and he didn't recognize older people like him because they were no longer like him.

Then he met Tony Stark, and he was painfully reminded that people _do_ change, because there was none of the respect everyone used to have for Howard in Tony's voice when he talked about his father. Steve was morbidly curious, and finally he looked up what his good friends had become, and they had all changed. Howard had changed the most, retaining only his genius.

So what would Steve have become? Would he have finally reached a growth spurt and, without Eskrine's advice about remaining who he was, would he have suddenly stopped fighting for the little guy? Would he have managed to enlist in the army and ended up as one of the generals signing hundreds of lives away without hesitation? Did anyone survive to old age without being crushed into apathy? It was enough to make his hands shake whenever he saw Tony, to make him snap at the man about values and heroism even though he secretly suspected his words had no truth to them.

Finally, as they were heading out to stop Loki, he shoved the question aside by cynically deciding that nobody reached the age of forty without either giving up on the little guy, or dying. If he had managed to join the army or been rejected from the serum program, he would have become someone he wouldn't recognize. He would have ended up one of two ways…

He would have been Howard Stark.

Or he would have been Bucky Barnes.

And then the world, seeming to sense his rare cynicism, decided to prove him wrong. It threw the rejection of his theory right in his face, because mere _hours_ after he reached the conclusion that only the young tried to be heroes, he arrived in a square full of the young and the old and those in between, on their knees. Even as his instincts screamed _protect the civilians,_ another part of his mind was fascinated at the words just barely carried to him on the breeze.

"Not to men like you." Steve was running forward, but he might not make it in time. Loki loved to talk, and that was all that was saving this man.

"There _are_ no men like me," the demigod bragged, and Steve was tempted to just throw his shield, but there was no guarantee of making a shot from this far away. He was reckless, sure, but not stupid. He knew attacking now would just cost innocents their lives.

The old man was standing stooped with age but straight with determination. The words issuing from cracked lips in an obviously German accent brought back memories of a war long since finished. "There are _always_ men like you."

And that's when Steve recognized the man, not in the sense that he had known him in the 1940s, but in the sense that his question was finally answered. What could he have become if he had never grown strong? If he had been very lucky then maybe, just maybe, he could have become this man who would stand up to a god in the name of never letting history repeat itself.

Loki was bringing his scepter up, sending a blast of magic straight at the old man, but Steve was there just in time. He knew, though, that the man would have laid down his life rather than stand down, and if there was one man like that in the whole world, a younger, weaker Steve Rogers would have at least fought to be like him.

Maybe, if he had been _very_ lucky, he would have grown up to be like the man in the square.


End file.
